Facebook launched a "modern messaging system," on Monday, a system that transcends e-mail, SMS, and other messaging services. "Facebook Mail," as some called it, also will include Facebook.com e-mail addresses.

The new Facebook Messages service will be rolled out slowly over the next few months, Facebook executives said.

According to Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, he asked a number of high scholers on the East Coast what e-mail client they used. He said they occasionally used Gmail or Yahoo Mail, but typically used SMS or Facebook.

About 350 million people use messaging on Facebook, in part because it's a really simple system, Zuckerberg said, with the vast majority between two people. Four billion messages are being transmitted, with the growth rate beginning to take off.

Zuckerberg said that Facebook had been working on a "modern messaging system" for about a year's time. It's not e-mail by itself, he said; it has seamless integration with your phone, e-mail, and other Web sites, Zuckerberg said. The new service is designed to unify e-mail, SMS, IM, and Facebook messaging.
The goal? It should be personal and simple; users shouldn't have to wade through a complex product, Zuckerberg said. And it should be short, not having to share it in long bursts.

"We tried to make it simple, so that people don't have to think about this stuff," Zuckerberg said. And where to send it to, and where not to send it to, so that the same message is not sent to several different channels."

The three main aspects of Facebook's messaging product are: seamless messaging, a convergence system that handles messages across the different mediums; conversation history, where a user could see all the IMs, messages SMSes, emails go into one history; and a social inbox.

People can have Facebook.com email addresses, but "it's not e-mail," Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg also refuted press reports that said that the project, called "Titan," will "kill" Gmail or any other system. "We don't expect anyone to shut down Yahoo Mail or their Gmail account and shift exclusively to Facebook," Zuckerberg said.

Users will interact with different people differently, according to priority and their available media, such as SMS texting or e-mail. If people interact with another person via e-mail, the reply will be via e-mail. Messages are sent as quickly as possible, however, Zuckerberg said, so if a user is online, the message will be sent as an instant message.

Like other e-mail systems, the Facebook messaging system will now save a conversation history, which executives said could maintain a sort of oral history. "Imagine you have the entire history of your conversation from 'Hey, nice to meet you, want to get coffee?' to 'Hey, can you pick up the kids."

"Five years from now, a user can have this full rich history with your friends and the users around you," Zuckerberg said.

The third aspect is a social inbox. Because we know who your friends are, and your friends are put in a friend list, Facebook can automatically "whitelist" messages, and users can specify that messages can only be accepted by friends, said Andrew Bosworth, director of engineering at Facebook.

There will be three folders; immediate messages from designated friends, and a sort of lower-priority inbox where bills or other messages can be sent. People will probably access that once a day, Zuckerberg said. A third folder, for junk or spam, will probably never be accessed. Users will be able to prioritize those lower-priority messages into the main inbox, executives said. In press demonstrations, those folders were accessible from the bottom of the page, something that wasn't immediately apparent in the screenshots that accompany this story.

Users will be given an undefined amount of cloud storage for attachments and the like.

But Facebook executives said that users don't have to import e-mail addresses, calling it "totally optional." Users also don't have to add a mobile phone for SMS messages, but users may receive an e-mail stating that a user wanted to send them an SMS, but could not.

A little over a year ago, Facebook looked at Cassandra, an open-source storage system. Facebook instead invested in hBase, built atop Hadoop. Facebook also invested to expand Haystack, Facebook's photo-sharing technology, for file attachments. Facebook's engineering team on the project totaled 15 people.

About the Author

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, require... See Full Bio

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